Episode 320: Questions I ask myself on my bday
Are you going after what you truly want in your life and business? In this episode, Fiona explores three important questions that make you think, and encourage listeners to check if they're following their true passions. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Significance of Birthdays and Self-reflection
the privilege of having a small business
Importance of focusing on solutions rather than problems
"Am I doing what I wanted to be doing with my life?”
the use of journaling to reflect and answer the questions
“Which parts of my life/small business could I improve upon?”
Using the Wheel of Life to assess different areas of life/business
Rating oneself on different aspects (e.g., family, health, spirituality, business relationships)
Importance of social relationships for mental health
Balancing personal priorities with business goals
Taking time for self-reflection and evaluation
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
When I'm thinking, "Am I doing what I wanted to be doing with my life?" I reflect on people like my friend who didn't get that opportunity. Because as I said before, running a business is a privilege. Aging is a privilege. Even me, I'm in my forties. Yes, technically I'm still in my early forties, but people will say, "I've got wrinkles", or I've got this, or I'm getting greys. All of those are a privilege. It is a privilege to age. It is a privilege to have the health to keep going and to keep living.
Welcome to episode 320 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today you are reading a coaching episode, and this one is a little deeper than perhaps some of the other business topics that we cover. As you may have guessed, I have a bit of a cold, not fun, but we'll try and get through this episode together. If you are new here, welcome. Today is a coaching episode. I also give you quick tip episodes every single Tuesday. And every alternate Thursday, we have either a coaching episode or an interview with another small business owner. If you are new here, know that you can go and binge 319 other episodes before this. Also, this episode will be available in text format over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast, and for this particular episode slash 320.
Before we get stuck, I wanted to remind you that Group Coaching, my 12-month program is going to be starting soon. The enrollments will be open very soon, but if you want to get on the waitlist and you want to enjoy some extra goodies, if you do go forward with Group Coaching such as extra one-on-one time with me, then you can put yourself down on the wait list at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and we'll link to that in the show notes. You'll also be able to see all of the elements that are involved in the 12-month program. I love running the group coaching program. I see people start out feeling quite unsure and maybe a little lacking in confidence in some areas of their business. Over the 12 months, I see them grow so hugely and just be able to promote themselves confidence and understand their financials with confidence, and I see their network and make friends within that Group Coaching Program as well. If you're interested, check out everything over at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching.
I also want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land and I'm coming to you from today, that is North Warrandyte. It is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and I pay my respects to their elders, past, and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
As I mentioned, I do have a cold. I woke up with a cold, which is not fun, but it was bound to happen. I have been travelling quite a bit, been on a lot of aeroplanes, been around a lot of people, and then came straight back to Melbourne and went into running a few parties for my youngest child, which involved going to a play centre. And those places are just full of germs. It was about to happen, but it's annoying that it's happened because today if you're reading this in real-time, it is my birthday. it's never fun to feel like crap on your birthday, but so be it. Today I wanted to talk about, not necessarily my birthday, but what birthdays can do in terms of being this marker in the year and a chance to stop and question and pause and think about the direction that your life is going.
I know that for myself every single year, my birthday falls on the same day every year, and it is smack bang in the middle of the year. I think it's a good opportunity to reset, to consider where am I going, and what am I doing. Am I happy right now? Which things would I like to change? Which things are going well? And to reset and remind ourselves that we are actually in control of a large part of our lives. I know that people often talk to me about the issues and the challenges and the stresses that they're having with a small business. And it may sound twee or a little fluffy or whatever else, but there's such a privilege in being able to have a small business, to be able to have that choice to start a business and to be able to have the freedom to control to a degree.
We can't control every single thing that happens in our business, but to control how you are making your money, many people around the world do not get that opportunity. I think that's a really important thing to remind yourself of, regardless of how your business is going right now, just to remind yourself that it is a privilege to be able to have a business. I know that it cannot feel like that at some points, but today I wanted to talk about the questions that I run through every single year on my birthday to remind myself of the fact that I am an adult, I do have agency over my life and I can control in many ways the direction that my life is going. I wanted to run through those questions today, but I also wanted you to think about these questions, not necessarily even about your life, but about your small business as well.
Stopping, taking the time to consider, am I just caught up in the day-to-day? Am I just keeping going, doing the same thing, getting used to the monotony of that? Or am I wanting to stop and change and remind myself that I can change things? I have done this many times in my life, but also many times in my business, I think that it is easy to complain and easy. I'm not saying that you can't you shouldn't complain ever or anything like that. I can put my hand up. I'm sure my husband would put both hands up and say that I do complain about lots of things all the time. But remind yourself that it's not about necessarily pointing out the problems all the time, but it's more about trying to find solutions. I think we've all probably worked in places where we are surrounded by problem pointers, and outers, is that even a word?
But people that are very good to point out the problems but not so good at finding solutions. I remember years ago we got our house painted by a lovely guy, but when we came back we'd gone away for a week, they painted it and then we came back and the colour just had not taken, it's a log cabin, it was very dry wood. The wood had just soaked in the paint. the colour was not as vibrant as we had hoped. I remember he just got quite defensive. My husband was annoyed about it and we kept just pointing out the problem. He kept pointing out the problem, it's the wood, it's not my problem. Eventually, I just said, “Look, we could go around for the next three hours pointing out the problem.”
What is the solution? What are we all going to do to find a solution to this? And in the end, he found a great solution, and repainted it with a different stain, worked beautifully, looks great, and we were able to sell it. The guy who bought it loves it. I guess that's just a reminder that as we go through this process today, try not to harbour what is wrong. That is a thing that you want to have a look at. Not what's wrong, but just not what is not working or where you are not loving things at the moment in your business and looking at how to rectify those, but not getting so stuck on the problems that you have no energy left to consider the solutions. I hope that makes sense. Since we get stuck into the actual questions that I ask myself every single June when I am reassessing my life, I also think these questions can be just as easily applied to your small business.
If you are in a position, you can write these down you can come back and answer them or you could even just pause this, write each one, answer it, and come back as if we're doing an interactive workshop exercise together. Or if you are not in a position to write these down right now, you can go to mydailybusiness.com/podcast/320 and find these in text format. And you can come back and answer them at a point where you have the mental space and the physical space to be able to think about them and put your answers in.
In no particular order, these are the key questions that I ask myself. The first is, am I doing what I wanted to be doing with my life? Now this can feel like a heavy and big one depends, or it could feel very exciting to you. Who knows? Depends on what your mindset is right now. But it also depends on the context. Me, I've talked about this previously, when I was 21, I was living overseas and my best friend at the time, a very close friend to me passed away in a car accident, a very tragic car accident. She was not very far from her home. I think she was just like she'd gone to the movies with her boyfriend or something. It was just tragic. I had to write the eulogy for that whilst travelling. It was a horrible thing to have to do when you were at that age. But also coming back to meeting with her parents who I met for many years, I still keep in touch with them 20 years later. And a reminder, I just recently went and visited the grave site of my friend just in December last year.
It's a huge reminder that she didn't get to do all these things that I have had the opportunity to do. She never got to become a mom. She never got to start a business, which she would've been incredible at. There are so many things that you take for granted and her life was cut short. When I do reflect on this often I'm, I think about her, I think about her pretty much most days. I think when you've had a great friendship like that or maybe it's somebody else in your life and they have passed away, you tend to think of them on key dates, like your birthday, their birthday, all of that. When I'm thinking, “Am I doing what I wanted to be doing with my life?” I reflect on people like my friend who didn't get that opportunity.
Because as I said before, running a business is a privilege. Aging is a privilege. Even me, I'm in my forties. Yes, technically I'm still in my early forties, but people will say, “I've got wrinkles” or I've got this, or I'm getting greys. All of those are a privilege. It is a privilege to age, it is a privilege, to have the health to keep going and to keep living. I stop and reflect am I doing what I wanted to be doing with my life? And that can look like lots of different things. You could use something like the Wheel of Life, if you Google Wheel of Life, you'll see it. It's just a wheel.
A lot of life coaches will use that as a framework. I think it came out in the 1970s. It is a circle that's divided into eight, 10, or 6 sections. Each of those represents an area of your life. It might be wealth, it might be sex, it might be relationships, family, job, whatever it is. And you can mark how well or not well those are doing. That could be a framework that you use to answer this question. Or you could just think about what were you wanting to do when you were a child or as a teenager or when you finished school, like what were your plans? Or even in the last few years, if you've sat down and reflected on this, how aligned or misaligned are you with those things that you wanted to do?
That's the first big question that I'll ask myself. And the way that I usually answer these is that I will, I will get a journal out and I will write almost like a diary entry to myself and be thinking about things. Recently I was again, a massive privilege able to travel. I went overseas, went to the US, the UK, and Europe, and thoroughly enjoyed that. That was a great thing because I had felt that travel was very much missing from my life. I'm somebody that used to travel quite a bit. I think most Australians love to travel. We couldn't travel because of the massive lockdowns, as per like the rest of the world. But also I think you can get into a rut or you can tell yourself, it's too hard, it's too far.
Everywhere is too far from Australia. That is something that I'm happy that I've done. I know that last year when I was reflecting on this stuff, travel was a big thing that I wanted to do more of. I've been able to do that twice already this year, which is a huge privilege to be able to do that. That's the first thing, think about am I doing what I wanted to be doing with my life? If you wanted to put this into a business perspective, you could take that same question. Are you doing what you wanted to be doing in your business? Wanted to be doing could mean all sorts of metrics. It could be am I making the money that I had hoped to make outside of the money though.
Am I enjoying the time that I get back from running my business? I work part-time, and I get a lot of time with my children. It is also the school holidays at the moment. Planning what we can do and having that freedom even at the moment I've gone overseas for two weeks. I've been working on my book quite heavily. I haven't seen clients in that time. I'm also moving in the next two weeks. I've also had to take time off there. If I was working in an employed role, I think this would be virtually impossible to take that much time off in the middle of a year when we are doing all of the end-of-financial-year sales and all the other things that need to be done at the mid-year time. again, I thank, am thankful that I have a business that allows me the freedom to do those sorts of things.
That first question is, am I doing what I wanted to be doing in my life? And if you want to reflect that in a business sense, are you doing what you wanted to be doing in your business? That's question one. The next question and this one is where I mentioned previously don't get so hung up on the problem. If you're going to be answering this question, think about the solution and try and have a solution-first mentality. The second question is, which parts of my life could I improve on? If you wanted to put this into a business perspective, which parts of your small business could you improve upon? Coming back to the life stuff, which parts of my life could I improve upon? This is where, if you wanted to use the Wheel of Life, that would be good.
You can just have section headers. For me, it might be family, health, spirituality, and business relationships, which are in there I would also include friendships. I will rate myself one out of 10 against these. I guess it's not necessarily that you have to improve year after year, but just to be honest with yourself and put a benchmark for your health. I know in 2021, I think I recorded an episode like, “This is going to be my year of health.” And that did not pan out last year. I had health smashed over my head by the universe you're going to pay attention to this. And this year, even though I'm coming to you with a cold, I do feel like I've taken a lot more steps. I do meal prep, I am going to a physio class every single week.
I am seeing my physio, I'm seeing an acupuncturist. I'm going for more of my daily walks with the dogs or sometimes without the dogs if I'm very lucky, but that rarely happens. I'm doing my stretches, I'm doing my yoga, I'm doing all the things, and as well as doing meditation. There was a moment on my trip recently overseas where I just felt like I was in a bit of a weird headspace. I'd gone to bed early, I was annoyed and I couldn't tell why I was annoyed and it's totally fine to be annoyed, but I just thought it was like, I want to get out of this funk. The next morning I got up, I did two meditations and I just did some reflecting and I felt so much better. It reminded me that I do need meditation in my life.
Every time I do meditation consistently. And it can be as little as 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes four days a week. I feel a lot better mentally. I might look at my health and mark myself out of 10, then I might look at like I said, family and be like, “Okay, am I being the parent that I want to be?” Recently I bought a book called Bringing Up Boys Who Like Themselves. I'm a mother of two boys and I think it's important to sometimes read these books. I'm not someone who generally reads parenting books. It's weird because I will read books on every other topic and then it's something that you think, I'm a parent, I should just know how to do this. I'm figuring it out, isn't everybody?
I think it's something that maybe you do when you have your first child and you read all these books, particularly in pregnancy, I feel like I read a lot of books, probably more books in pregnancy than after having a child. But that is something that I want to put more effort into. I'm reading that book. I'm also reading Steve, I can't remember his surname. I'm sure other people will know who I'm talking about. Maggie Dent, is that the right person? I'm reading some books about raising boys. I think it is an important thing. I'm not a boy and I didn't grow up as a boy. Also even if whatever gender is or non-binary or whatever, I grew up in a different generation. I grew up without the internet.
Everything is very different. I want to be the best parent that I can be. Under family, I might put things in there like, I'm going to be doing more research, I'm going to be asking for help. I'm going to be maybe doing some short courses. I know family members who've done short courses in parenting and I was like, “Do they exist?” Like outside of pregnancy stuff and the very early days of having a child. that is something that I want to improve upon. I might put that into the section of the family under relationships, including friendships. I know that I'm somebody who, I talk to people all day long. It is my job. I'm talking to people most days, let's say Tuesdays and Thursdays, I talk to people all day long, like on a Thursday, which is my long day, I can have six or seven coaching sessions and that's a lot.
Sometimes you get off the end of those days and they're amazing and exhilarating and energizing, but you also don't necessarily feel like getting on the phone to a friend and talking for an hour because it's like, I've been talking and talking and sometimes I just want to go and like read a book or meditate or watch Netflix, talk to my husband over a cup of tea or just go to bed. I know that maybe with my job, more so than say somebody who's maybe I don't know, a ceramicist and is by themselves quite a lot of the day and not necessarily talking to other people maybe unless they're in a studio. But let's say you're by yourself and you're making ceramics or you're making jewelry or you're making something else. I'm not somebody in that position, but I have worked with lots of people that do that.
Potentially you may want to go and meet your friends after work because you haven't spoken to people all day and you're like, I want a bit of human interaction. Whereas sometimes for me it can be the opposite. With my friendships and my wonderful friends who I am incredibly lucky to have, and they know who they are, I can sometimes feel as if I need to put a bit more effort in. I definitely think I do put in effort in some cases, but everyone gets busy and everything else. This year I have tried to go, there are certain people I want to see. I'm going to make more of an effort to set up a date. See them, let's do this. I also have to shout out my friend Chriss Mannix from Soda Communications, who is amazing at doing this.
We have a dinner every three months and she will be like at the end of each dinner, “Okay, get your diary out, when's our next dinner? Book it in.” We go to the same restaurant every time and it's just lovely because it's like, “Okay, it's in the diary.” I think that is not very hard to do. And yet sometimes we'll or I know that I will be like, yep, we'll meet up. And then life gets in the way you just push it out and push it out. That is something that I want to improve upon this year. You can have different sections in that question of which parts of my life could I improve upon. Or in your business, which parts of your small business could you improve upon?
Underneath each, you want to be giving yourself solutions. What is the solution? The solution might be, let's say with a particular friend, I am going to meet up with them every month and we're going to have a standing date to meet up with, or we're going to be like every second Wednesday we do this. Whatever it is, you can make that happen. It doesn't necessarily even have to be a meeting up, it could be a phone call. It's just a way of keeping in touch and keeping those social relationships happening because they're so important. Not just are they enjoyable but mentally for your mental health. It's also been proven that people who have friendships survive longer. All of these things, they are such an important part. I think when you have a business, sometimes you can let that business overtake other things in your life that are just as important if not more important.
That's number two. The second question is, which parts of my life could I improve upon? Or like I said, if you wanted to think about this in business terms, which parts of your small business could you improve upon? And the third question that I ask myself is, which part of my life is better right now than I could have imagined? That is something that, again, I don't think we all take enough time to look at. I think a lot of the time people focus on the problems, focus on what we don't have, focus on where we are not, or how far away we are from X, Y, Z, or how far below we are that we compare ourselves to other people in terms of how much money they're making, where they live, what their house looks like, everything that we can often look at other people's lives and we are always seeing the highlight reels.
We're not seeing necessarily the nitty-gritty, dirty stuff. They're not happy to air. You want to think about though, what parts of my life are bloody amazing? Which parts am I just so thankful for and are better than anything I could have imagined? In there I might put things like my partner and I don't think he listens to this podcast very often, but I would say that in that relationship, we have been together 17 years, and we've been married 15 years this year. That is better than I imagine. Of course, it is not perfect. We have had moments where it is very hard. But when I was growing up, I had a couple of boyfriends at high school, and I just didn't date for a long time. So much so that my mother sat me down and asked me if there was anything I needed to tell her.
My eldest brother also asked me, and I was like, “No”, I'm not going to accept anyone I'm not going to be someone who dates for the sake of dating. I had often imagined myself as I would be this single writer and I'd be like the auntie to all my friends' kids. I wanted kids, but I didn't necessarily think that I would meet someone who ticked all the boxes that I wanted to be ticked. And to have met someone and have grown with that person and grown and grown and become best friends with that person and had a long relationship. 17 years is a decent stint. It's almost an adult if you think about it in terms of a child.
I think in Australia, the average first marriage lasts 12.1 years. And that's not to say if you're in a crap marriage, you shouldn't just stay in there for the sake of sticking it out. But I would say that one thing that is better than I imagined is the relationship that I have with him. That could be one thing. Also, if you want to take this question into a business mindset, then you would have, which parts of your small business are better than you could have imagined. Again, if I was to answer that, I would think I am quite free to work the hours that I want to work. Yes, I have certain financial goals and we've just bought a new house that is, I have to hit those numbers and need to hit them.
But I know that if my kids are sick and if I'm sick if I've got other things going on, I can move things about. I know that I'm not trying to do that all the time to lead me. If you're a client and you've had to be moved about, know that we are not doing that flippantly at all. But I have set my business up in a way that the majority of the time things can be moved if they need to be. I know again, that is a real privilege and I'm not running a physical shop. I don't have a whole lot of staff that are dependent on me working a certain amount of hours or them working a certain amount of hours. I get that that is a privilege and the way that I've set my business up is different to a lot of small businesses.
But to think about which parts of your small business are better than you could have imagined, and again, with your life, which parts of your life are better than you could have imagined? I'm also incredibly lucky to live where I live and am surrounded by bush. It was one of the things that I missed when I was overseas, which sounds so silly. I wasn't overseas for that long, and I was in these cities that I've lived in before for years and loved like London. And yet I felt this longing for the bush and the beautiful scenery that I get to live in every single day. That is a huge part of my life that I'm incredibly thankful for. You can ask yourself a bunch more questions as well, but answering that last question of what parts of my life are better than I could have imagined, allows you to free yourself from that problem.
This isn't working, I'm crap, the business is not going here. Whatever else you might be going through, take a refresher and reframe how awesomely lucky am I to have X, Y, Z. I'm not speaking from a place where everything in my life is just so perfect. It's not, it's for sure not. And taking time out of the business, like taking time off to go travelling, which I did twice this year already, taking time off to move into a new house, taking time off to write a book, all of those things have a direct impact on my cashflow and the money that is coming into this business. I've had to accept that I may well earn less this year than I earned last year, and that's okay because I've prioritized other things that are important to me as well.
You want to think about those three questions that I've gone through. Am I doing what I wanted to be doing in my life, and what am I doing what I wanted to be doing in my business? The second one is which parts of my life could I improve upon. And then which parts of my small business could I improve upon? And the third question, which parts are better about my life than I could have imagined? And which parts of your business are better than you could have imagined? It's taking those questions, taking the time to sit with them, and maybe coming into a situation where maybe you do these questions on your birthday or you choose my birthday in the middle of the year to do the questions, or you do them at the start of the year or whatever it is.
But getting into a place where you can pause and reflect and take the time to consider your life and your business and what you are doing about each on the daily, this is why I called the business, My Daily Business, to think about what are some daily actions that you can do. Let's say for example, when I talked about friendships, some daily actions I can do is check in with my friends, check in with a bit more message them, see how they're going, do a quick voice note, and call them whatever it is. And not to be, this is another thing to do, but to want to do those things which I do. I have some wonderful, wonderful friends, some newer than others, some of my oldest friends. I want to make more of an effort in that regard.
I might think, what am I doing daily for that? Likewise, in your business, is there something that you want to improve upon? What are you doing daily or weekly or monthly? And putting things into the calendar, making sure that they're getting done. It's not something that you just sit there and reflect and isn't this great, but you actually take whatever your answers are and then implement change based on those answers. I hope that has been interesting for you today. As I said, this is something that I do quite often on my birthday. Again, I have to apologize for my voice. I am hoping that by the time I'm recording next time this annoying cold has gone. But thank you so much for reading and thank you for being part of my business journey. I get so many DMs and messages about this podcast, I get people that I meet in real life that are like, “I listen to your podcast and it feels like you're a friend”, and that just means the world.
Thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to be with you for even a tiny bit of your day on your business journey. If you wanted to go through this in text format, you can find the show notes, including everything I've said over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast. If you also want to get any emails like this, we do have an email that goes out every single Sunday and that you can subscribe to at mydailybusiness.com/subscribe. Lastly, I just wanted to remind you that group coaching will open very soon if you want to get on the waitlist. If you're on the waitlist and you end up in the Group Coaching group, you do get some extra freebies and extra not freebies, goodies, you get some extra time with my other good things. You can go over and join the waitlist at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. And over there you'll also find all the information about Group Coaching, how often we meet, what's involved, what are all the extras that you get outside of the coaching sessions. I've had so many people do this and say that it's completely revolutionized their business. If you're interested, it's just mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. Thanks so much for reading.
